Europe is so ass backwards with its, socialism, communism, capitalism, dictatorships... FFS pick one!
Yeah, at least the USA never suffered capitalism, did it?
At least in the US we aren't 100% completely dependent on a disenfranchised worker class of illegal muslim immigrants.
True enough. In the USA they're Mexican.
At least we have a Federal Reserve and a single currency. Are you using Lira or Euros? Pounds or Euros? Duetchmarks or Euros? Franks or Euros?
Where were you planning to spend those Lira, Franks and Deutchmarks?
At least our country isn't setting up cameras and microphones on every corner, reading our mail, and telling us to spy on our neighbors and sift through their trash.
At least it's not telling you about it.
Yeah... sure the USA is screwed up. However, suggesting that Europe is LESS screwed up is pretty offensive to the descendants of, and the people, that sacrificed their lives to rescue Europe from the Germans, Russians, and Japanese.
Who curiously had no interest in "saving us" until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour...
Eh? Tell me again, how is seeing boobies going to scar a 6 yo kid for life? They already saw some shortly after birth. ZOMG THEY EVEN TOUCHED THEM! Think of the children! Ban breastfeeding!
Odd, but interesting. I would see that as a secular point of view. Arguing about the point of the Bible will always boil down to whether or not you believe it infallible or not. From what I can gather, you're on the latter.
I'm not even sure what it would mean for the Bible to be "infallible". It means it can't fail, but it can't fail to what? I certainly don't believe it to be without error.
Well, any evidence would make me change my mind.
I asked what evidence. What sort of thing would you count as evidence?
I don't find science/evolution theory to have proved anything that can be used as evidence against a God - in the light of the Bible.
I don't find science has proved anything that can be used as evidence against a god(with or without the Bible) -- I don't believe it could, although it could disprove certain types of claim made on behalf of a god.
They may have records to determine that a specific account uploaded or downloaded a specific file. What they are unlikely to know is whether the owner of the account knew about the transaction or whether the owner of the account has the legal right to upload or download the file.
It's not only in a philosophical sense but also in a scientific sense. In ordinary conversation of course we fudge it, but when you're discussing science the fact [1] that we can't call evolution a "fact" goes close to the heart of what science is.
I see what you mean, but I don't see the advantage in adding these disclaimers to "evolution is a fact" when, insofar as anything is a fact, evolution can be said to be one, so the absolutist terminology is unlikely to lead to ambiguity.
What can be said to be a fact is that something that has been falsified is false. It is a fact that the claim that there are no black swans is false -- it has been falsified. We can legitimately transform that into "some swans are black". This is scientific fact. "Evolution is true" is not in the same category, and the distinction is crucial to science.
Where I strongly disagree with you though is in your original claim I responded to: responding to "evolution is a fact," you said "welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists." No. You can say that, in your opinion, there needs to be a qualification there, since there is always more data to discover, and in a very abstract, formal sense you'd be right. But when one person is saying "X is a fact, and here is a mountain of evidence that shows it" and another is saying "Y is a fact despite mountains of evidence, because I have a book that says so," the two are not in the same intellectual territory.
Both have stepped outside science.
The most I think you can say is that Dawkins, and people like him, are a short-term danger to science education.
Yes, what I said was shorthand for that:-) And, of course, if science education is damaged then science will suffer.
despite his rhetoric, I don't think Dawkins has much chance of adding a "How we know God does not exist" section to high school biology texts...
Well, if the pupils only learn from set texts they're safe from him:-)
[1] By logical inference from definition, so I can call "fact" there -- if you accept my logic and definitions!
If the ISP says "we have received a complaint that on at or about you download file from in violation of copyright. Our records confirm that this appears to be correct. If you do not explain, with evidence, why this was not a copyright violation we will consider further action which may include suspension of your account" then not too bad.
If -- as seems far more likely -- the ISP says "We have received a complaint that at some unspecified time you downloaded some unspecified file, which might have been in breach of copyright, so we've suspended your account" then I'm not impressed.
But that's just the distinction people are trying to make here -- in talking about facts, I, and GP, weren't talking about the theory. Theory is something that tries to explain a given set of observations. But those observations still exist as independent facts
They exist as data, not as facts. Obervations can be mistaken.
In everyday usage it's a "fact", but science is more disciplined. A scientist might not always go to the lengths of saying "A series of observations have been made, the best explanation of which is the eruption of a volcano in Alaska" (life's too short), but if pushed should admit that that's the strongest claim they can make [1]. It's not a "fact" but it's abloody good working hypothesis!
But claiming the volcanic eruption is a fact in retrospect does not endanger "science."
If it's used to mask the true nature of the scientific claim then I believe it does.
But if you're going to push things to the point where if I say "it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" and you say that's dogma, not data -- and that's something we can actually observe happening, every year -- then I don't think you will ever be content referring to common descent as a fact, no matter what the evidence...
Indeed I won't. I'm happy to accept "The Earth goes around the sun" as a shorthand, I'm happy to accept "Observations have been made, the best explanation of which to date is that the Earth goes around the sun", but as soon as you say "It's a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" you've stepped outside science.
I think this shows a lack of perspective. Dawkins is a jerk who should stay out of metaphysics, but he's no danger to "science" even though he sometimes misrepresents it.
I never mentioned Dawkins! I do think he represents a danger to science, though -- go to the forum on his website and you'll find a lot of folks who take his misrepresentations as gospel and who defend them with religious fervour (deliberate choice of words). I suspect he's causing as much public misunderstanding of science as The Discovery Institute is -- possibly more, because he's probably read more widely.
If evolutionary theory was merely "dogma"
Careful! I never said evolutionary theory was dogma, I said that the claim that evolutionary theory is fact was dogma. Evolutionary theory may or may not be dogma, depending on the individual. If they believe it because they've been taught to believe it then it's dogma. If they believe it because they've considered it alongside other possible explanations and believe it to be the best explanation they are aware of so far to explain observed phenomenon then it's not dogma. As soon as you call it "fact" you close off the second possibility.
There would likely have been a pretty bad reaction if in the early 20th century you tried to claim the sun goes around the Earth, but the imposition of that "dogma" didn't prevent the acceptance of relativity when the evidence was there to back it up...
Of course, the early 20th century was before the positivists and before Popper's introduced the criterion of falsifiability, so what was understood then by science was very different to what we understand by the word now.
[1] There are some metaphysical assumptions underlying this, but I don't think it would help to go into them here.
My understanding is that it's true of Neptune (this site agrees), but it may be true of Mercury too. I get hazy about anything more than a day's drive from home.
Do you believe it possible that you may be mistaken that the Bible is infallible?
Is it possible? Yes. Do I believe I'm mistaken? No.
So what sort of (hypothetical) evidence would make you change your mind?
You went further than that in your previous post.
No I did not - I said exactly the same thing.
Not exactly the same thing, but you may have though them equivalent.
I'd be interested to know what you think the whole point of the Bible is then.
At one level I don't think the Bible has a "whole point". I think it's a diverse collection of books each of which has its own point or points. At a meta-level, most of those books are about how people believe God has interacted, is interacting and will interact with specific individuals and/or with humanity as a whole.
So SJG suggested we use the term scientific fact to keep the creotards from using a semantics argument to suggest that even scientists don't believe that evolution by natural selection occurs or explains life on our world. He proposed a definition of a scientific fact as: "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
As I've just said in reply to another message in this thread, "I think that at the moment science is as much under threat from those misrepresenting it in order to defend against creationism as it is from those misrepresenting it in order to promote creationism". Much as I respect Gould, and don't wish to speak ill of the dead, I think this idea of his is even worse than his excusing religion on the grounds of non-overlapping magisteria. He's essentially saying "let's pretend science is saying something it isn't, because that will be good for science".
I can say heliocentrism is a fact and you will probably not claim I have entered the realm of dogma.
Actually, I would say you had entered the realm of dogma.
Logically that is no different than saying the same about evolution, except that you seem to believe the evidence for that fact is not as well established. Which is true in a sense, just because heliocentrism is so very, very, very well established.
I believe that the evidence for both is incredibly well established, and I firmly believe in both. But it's absolutely fundamental to the scientific method that no amount of confirmation moves a theory to the realm of "fact" but one instance of refutation moves it to the realm of "definitely not a fact" [1]. I think that at the moment science is as much under threat from those misrepresenting it in order to defend against creationism as it is from those misrepresenting it in order to promote creationism.
[1] Technically which way around falsification works depends on whether the theory is stated as a negative existential statement or a positive universal statement, of course.
OK, educate me: what is the difference between "fundamentalist" and "protestant." I was under the impression that protestants were "protesting" the changes that the Catholic Church had made, and were therefore returning to the "fundamentals" of Christianity or something wacky like that.
This being one of the reasons why protestants refuse to accept evolution: the Catholic Church does accept it. AFAIK, only protestants refuse to accept evolution as truth.
No, you're confusing two different things.
The protestants did indeed protest against some Roman Catholic doctrines and practices in the 16th century, but not all of them. Most Christian doctrines are still shared by protestants and Roman Catholics.
(Christian) Fundamentalism is a movement within protestantism, that developed in the late 19th/early 20th century as a reaction to protestantism doing exactly what most folks here think it should do -- change in the light of new evidence and better understanding. Protestantism was a reaction against Catholicism, fundamentalism was a reaction against modernism.
Your conflation of those two things is revealing though -- it helps me understand some of the hostility to Christianity, if a reactionary movement within it is mistaken for the whole thing. It's like condemning the republican party because you think they're the same as the KKK or condemning the democrats because you think they're the same as revolutionary communists.
"BTW, Newton's work is very much true in the appropriate domain. Just as with any science. There is no place for including weak nuclear interaction in calculating the motion of planets
Bad example. You might not need the weak nuclear force, but you can't explain the observed peturbations in Neptune's orbit using Newtonian mechanics. You need general relativity.
I'm sorry, but I didn't say that people don't mis-interpret the Bible, I said that a Christian believes the Bible to be true and correct, and that a true Christian seeks to base their doctrines an beliefs from the Bible its self - not from what they think is best.
I didn't say anything about misinterpretation. Do you believe it possible that you may be mistaken that the Bible is infallible?
I'm honestly surprised that you claim to have read the Bible 'from cover to cover' but still didn't get that the whole theme is about our sin and Christ's saving us from it.
You wen't further than that in your previous post.
If perhaps you hadn't of admitted that you missed the whole point of the Bible after purportedly reading it from cover to cover then I may have taken heed to that statement.
I didn't admit any such thing. I simply stated that I didn't agree with what you think is the whole point of it. I used to, but I studied more deeply and changed my mind.
Oh, and on your first point: any 'true' Christian is defined by the Christian Bible. If they don't put their faith in that to be true and correct (infallible) then they are on shaky ground.
It's only a small minority of those who call themselves Christians who have so much arrogance as to believe they cannot be mistaken about the nature of the Bible.
According to the Bible, the most important thing is to believe a) you're a sinner and b) only Christ can save you from your sin
I've read it cover to cover and didn't get that from it.
its what suites God that matters.
Big jump from what you think God wants to what God wants.
I would really suggest you look at The Westminster Confession of Faith.
I've read that cover to cover, too. I think it contains some good stuff and some utter nonsense.
I don't think you'd find a better book to run you through the basics.
I think you should perhaps assume that I've got the basics covered.
Yes but they are interpretations of ancient documents, not interpretations of mathematical equations and physical experiments.
They're interpretations of current experience as much as they're interpretations of ancient documents. When the religious person experiences something they check whether it fits with their current theories, and only modify their current theories if it doesn't fit. Much as scientific people do (after all, they're often the same people). Note that I'm not trying to argue that science and religion are the same thing -- they're not. It's just that this isn't where the difference lies.
Heck, the "coalition of the willing" invaded Iraq to get to somebody believed to be hiding near the Afghan/Pakistani border -- invading Australia instead of New Zealand seems to be as good as our precision strikes get nowadays.
That used to work the other way around, too. When the police kept moving anti-apartheid protestors away from the South African embassy in London, the Church of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields, right opposite the embassy, invited the protestors onto the church steps, where the police couldn't touch them because the protest was perfectly legal on private land with the consent of the landowner. Of course, now the protestors could just be served with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders on the grounds that they are annoying the neighbours:-(
A true Christian believes there is another sense, the soul - that is actually the core of a human. Unfortunately for materialists, this is illogical because they can't measure or define it using their material senses - meaning endless looping arguments.
Who defines what a "true Christian believes"? I ask, because I don't recall the doctrine that the soul is a sense occurring anywhere in the Bible or the classic creeds of Christianity. So although I'd have no problems with "some Christians believe" but I wonder by what authority you claim them to be the only true Christians.
I would wager that many of you here believe that extraterrestrial aliens could exist (an existence that cannot be materially defined), but completely deny the possibility of a God who created this whole universe. I'd also wager that many of you here would believe that an extraterrestrial could exist in a form of being that we have not come across before - yet STILL won't believe in the possibility of a God that created this whole universe.
I find it quite frustrating.
Perhaps you're missing the role of Ockham's razor in science. Ockham's razor doesn't tell us anything about what's actually true, but it helps us to decide in what order to consider theories -- scientists deal with the simplest first. Since the Christian God is traditionally claimed to have a few infinite attributes, science will only consider that possibility once they've dealt with all finite possibilities (which means in practice that they'll never get to the infinite case). Science will deal with the possibility of a being that is merely very powerful and very knowledgeable (your alien) before it deals with the case of a being that is infinitely powerful and infinitely knowledgeable (the traditional Christian God). Even if we have the extra sense you describe then the same will apply to how science would interpret the perceptions of that sense.
It's important, though, that none of this excludes belief in God, or makes it unreasonable, it just makes it unscientific. Science isn't omniscient either. There is a place in life for stuff that isn't scientific; after all, when scientists believe their spouses to be faithful it's rarely on the grounds of randomized double-blind trials of a sample of spouses.
Well, as I am a solipsist I have proved it to my own satisfaction sufficiently for all practical purposes that one exists. But note that solipsism has been rather misrepresented hereabouts. I am an epistemological solipsist, that is, I believe it is impossible to know beyond any doubt that the external world exists, but that doesn't mean that I think it doesn't. I happen to think it does, but that's a matter of belief, not knowledge, and cannot be rationally justified.
As for your argument that religions "mainly seem to have been attempts at rational explanation of observations", I disagree with the "mainly", but even insofar as you're correct, the fact that those attempts *weren't* truly rational is what makes them religious. That's what was so explosive about the scientific revolution - humankind finally figured out a way to rationally find answers without error (which isn't to say that scientists don't make errors).
I think you overestimate the rationality of science. I'm not saying that science isn't rational, but that it cannot be entirely founded on rationality. The positivists tried to do that, and Karl Popper blew them out of the water. He gave us falsifiability in place of the "scandal" of induction, but had to concede that the boundary between the scientific and the metaphysical can only ever be a convention -- try reading his "The Logic of Scientific Discovery"; it's quite accessible.
Speaking of errors, scientists get stuck in their conception of how things are and begin to fail to consider that which is contrary, just like everyone else. But science isn't any more a religion than political ideology is. To include those in the word "religion" is to strip the word of all unique meaning.
If that refers to my comment elsewhere in this thread about those whose religion includes science, I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote. I didn't say that science was a religion, rather that some take a definition of religion that doesn't assume irrationality and that is wide enough in scope to cover all that they are engaged in, including science. I think John Polkinghorne takes that approach.
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Yeah, sure, Europe is doing SO well...
Europe is so ass backwards with its, socialism, communism, capitalism, dictatorships... FFS pick one!
Yeah, at least the USA never suffered capitalism, did it?
At least in the US we aren't 100% completely dependent on a disenfranchised worker class of illegal muslim immigrants.
True enough. In the USA they're Mexican.
At least we have a Federal Reserve and a single currency. Are you using Lira or Euros? Pounds or Euros? Duetchmarks or Euros? Franks or Euros?
Where were you planning to spend those Lira, Franks and Deutchmarks?
At least our country isn't setting up cameras and microphones on every corner, reading our mail, and telling us to spy on our neighbors and sift through their trash.
At least it's not telling you about it.
Yeah... sure the USA is screwed up. However, suggesting that Europe is LESS screwed up is pretty offensive to the descendants of, and the people, that sacrificed their lives to rescue Europe from the Germans, Russians, and Japanese.
Who curiously had no interest in "saving us" until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour...
Eh? Tell me again, how is seeing boobies going to scar a 6 yo kid for life? They already saw some shortly after birth. ZOMG THEY EVEN TOUCHED THEM! Think of the children! Ban breastfeeding!
Please don't give them ideas!
Odd, but interesting. I would see that as a secular point of view. Arguing about the point of the Bible will always boil down to whether or not you believe it infallible or not. From what I can gather, you're on the latter.
I'm not even sure what it would mean for the Bible to be "infallible". It means it can't fail, but it can't fail to what? I certainly don't believe it to be without error.
Well, any evidence would make me change my mind.
I asked what evidence. What sort of thing would you count as evidence?
I don't find science/evolution theory to have proved anything that can be used as evidence against a God - in the light of the Bible.
I don't find science has proved anything that can be used as evidence against a god(with or without the Bible) -- I don't believe it could, although it could disprove certain types of claim made on behalf of a god.
They may have records to determine that a specific account uploaded or downloaded a specific file. What they are unlikely to know is whether the owner of the account knew about the transaction or whether the owner of the account has the legal right to upload or download the file.
If the ISP says "we have received a complaint that on at or about date you download file filename from url or whatever in violation of copyright.
Of course, when I was previewing I missed the fact that /. had read my intended variables as invalid HTML, and deleted them!
well, fair enough, in a philosophical sense
It's not only in a philosophical sense but also in a scientific sense. In ordinary conversation of course we fudge it, but when you're discussing science the fact [1] that we can't call evolution a "fact" goes close to the heart of what science is.
I see what you mean, but I don't see the advantage in adding these disclaimers to "evolution is a fact" when, insofar as anything is a fact, evolution can be said to be one, so the absolutist terminology is unlikely to lead to ambiguity.
What can be said to be a fact is that something that has been falsified is false. It is a fact that the claim that there are no black swans is false -- it has been falsified. We can legitimately transform that into "some swans are black". This is scientific fact. "Evolution is true" is not in the same category, and the distinction is crucial to science.
Where I strongly disagree with you though is in your original claim I responded to: responding to "evolution is a fact," you said "welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists." No. You can say that, in your opinion, there needs to be a qualification there, since there is always more data to discover, and in a very abstract, formal sense you'd be right. But when one person is saying "X is a fact, and here is a mountain of evidence that shows it" and another is saying "Y is a fact despite mountains of evidence, because I have a book that says so," the two are not in the same intellectual territory.
Both have stepped outside science.
The most I think you can say is that Dawkins, and people like him, are a short-term danger to science education.
Yes, what I said was shorthand for that :-) And, of course, if science education is damaged then science will suffer.
despite his rhetoric, I don't think Dawkins has much chance of adding a "How we know God does not exist" section to high school biology texts...
Well, if the pupils only learn from set texts they're safe from him :-)
[1] By logical inference from definition, so I can call "fact" there -- if you accept my logic and definitions!
It depends what the process is.
If the ISP says "we have received a complaint that on at or about you download file from in violation of copyright. Our records confirm that this appears to be correct. If you do not explain, with evidence, why this was not a copyright violation we will consider further action which may include suspension of your account" then not too bad.
If -- as seems far more likely -- the ISP says "We have received a complaint that at some unspecified time you downloaded some unspecified file, which might have been in breach of copyright, so we've suspended your account" then I'm not impressed.
No problem then. Give him a push and he'll topple over.
But that's just the distinction people are trying to make here -- in talking about facts, I, and GP, weren't talking about the theory. Theory is something that tries to explain a given set of observations. But those observations still exist as independent facts
They exist as data, not as facts. Obervations can be mistaken.
It is a fact that there was a volcanic eruption in Alaska a few days ago.
In everyday usage it's a "fact", but science is more disciplined. A scientist might not always go to the lengths of saying "A series of observations have been made, the best explanation of which is the eruption of a volcano in Alaska" (life's too short), but if pushed should admit that that's the strongest claim they can make [1]. It's not a "fact" but it's abloody good working hypothesis!
But claiming the volcanic eruption is a fact in retrospect does not endanger "science."
If it's used to mask the true nature of the scientific claim then I believe it does.
But if you're going to push things to the point where if I say "it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" and you say that's dogma, not data -- and that's something we can actually observe happening, every year -- then I don't think you will ever be content referring to common descent as a fact, no matter what the evidence...
Indeed I won't. I'm happy to accept "The Earth goes around the sun" as a shorthand, I'm happy to accept "Observations have been made, the best explanation of which to date is that the Earth goes around the sun", but as soon as you say "It's a fact that the Earth goes around the sun" you've stepped outside science.
I think this shows a lack of perspective. Dawkins is a jerk who should stay out of metaphysics, but he's no danger to "science" even though he sometimes misrepresents it.
I never mentioned Dawkins! I do think he represents a danger to science, though -- go to the forum on his website and you'll find a lot of folks who take his misrepresentations as gospel and who defend them with religious fervour (deliberate choice of words). I suspect he's causing as much public misunderstanding of science as The Discovery Institute is -- possibly more, because he's probably read more widely.
If evolutionary theory was merely "dogma"
Careful! I never said evolutionary theory was dogma, I said that the claim that evolutionary theory is fact was dogma. Evolutionary theory may or may not be dogma, depending on the individual. If they believe it because they've been taught to believe it then it's dogma. If they believe it because they've considered it alongside other possible explanations and believe it to be the best explanation they are aware of so far to explain observed phenomenon then it's not dogma. As soon as you call it "fact" you close off the second possibility.
There would likely have been a pretty bad reaction if in the early 20th century you tried to claim the sun goes around the Earth, but the imposition of that "dogma" didn't prevent the acceptance of relativity when the evidence was there to back it up...
Of course, the early 20th century was before the positivists and before Popper's introduced the criterion of falsifiability, so what was understood then by science was very different to what we understand by the word now.
[1] There are some metaphysical assumptions underlying this, but I don't think it would help to go into them here.
My understanding is that it's true of Neptune (this site agrees), but it may be true of Mercury too. I get hazy about anything more than a day's drive from home.
Is it possible? Yes. Do I believe I'm mistaken? No.
So what sort of (hypothetical) evidence would make you change your mind?
You went further than that in your previous post.
No I did not - I said exactly the same thing.
Not exactly the same thing, but you may have though them equivalent.
I'd be interested to know what you think the whole point of the Bible is then.
At one level I don't think the Bible has a "whole point". I think it's a diverse collection of books each of which has its own point or points. At a meta-level, most of those books are about how people believe God has interacted, is interacting and will interact with specific individuals and/or with humanity as a whole.
So SJG suggested we use the term scientific fact to keep the creotards from using a semantics argument to suggest that even scientists don't believe that evolution by natural selection occurs or explains life on our world. He proposed a definition of a scientific fact as: "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent."
As I've just said in reply to another message in this thread, "I think that at the moment science is as much under threat from those misrepresenting it in order to defend against creationism as it is from those misrepresenting it in order to promote creationism". Much as I respect Gould, and don't wish to speak ill of the dead, I think this idea of his is even worse than his excusing religion on the grounds of non-overlapping magisteria. He's essentially saying "let's pretend science is saying something it isn't, because that will be good for science".
I can say heliocentrism is a fact and you will probably not claim I have entered the realm of dogma.
Actually, I would say you had entered the realm of dogma.
Logically that is no different than saying the same about evolution, except that you seem to believe the evidence for that fact is not as well established. Which is true in a sense, just because heliocentrism is so very, very, very well established.
I believe that the evidence for both is incredibly well established, and I firmly believe in both. But it's absolutely fundamental to the scientific method that no amount of confirmation moves a theory to the realm of "fact" but one instance of refutation moves it to the realm of "definitely not a fact" [1]. I think that at the moment science is as much under threat from those misrepresenting it in order to defend against creationism as it is from those misrepresenting it in order to promote creationism.
[1] Technically which way around falsification works depends on whether the theory is stated as a negative existential statement or a positive universal statement, of course.
OK, educate me: what is the difference between "fundamentalist" and "protestant." I was under the impression that protestants were "protesting" the changes that the Catholic Church had made, and were therefore returning to the "fundamentals" of Christianity or something wacky like that.
This being one of the reasons why protestants refuse to accept evolution: the Catholic Church does accept it. AFAIK, only protestants refuse to accept evolution as truth.
No, you're confusing two different things.
The protestants did indeed protest against some Roman Catholic doctrines and practices in the 16th century, but not all of them. Most Christian doctrines are still shared by protestants and Roman Catholics.
(Christian) Fundamentalism is a movement within protestantism, that developed in the late 19th/early 20th century as a reaction to protestantism doing exactly what most folks here think it should do -- change in the light of new evidence and better understanding. Protestantism was a reaction against Catholicism, fundamentalism was a reaction against modernism.
Your conflation of those two things is revealing though -- it helps me understand some of the hostility to Christianity, if a reactionary movement within it is mistaken for the whole thing. It's like condemning the republican party because you think they're the same as the KKK or condemning the democrats because you think they're the same as revolutionary communists.
Evolution is a FACT.
You've just moved from the realm of science to the realm of dogma. Welcome to the same intellectual territory as the creationists.
"BTW, Newton's work is very much true in the appropriate domain. Just as with any science. There is no place for including weak nuclear interaction in calculating the motion of planets
Bad example. You might not need the weak nuclear force, but you can't explain the observed peturbations in Neptune's orbit using Newtonian mechanics. You need general relativity.
I'm sorry, but I didn't say that people don't mis-interpret the Bible, I said that a Christian believes the Bible to be true and correct, and that a true Christian seeks to base their doctrines an beliefs from the Bible its self - not from what they think is best.
I didn't say anything about misinterpretation. Do you believe it possible that you may be mistaken that the Bible is infallible?
I'm honestly surprised that you claim to have read the Bible 'from cover to cover' but still didn't get that the whole theme is about our sin and Christ's saving us from it.
You wen't further than that in your previous post.
If perhaps you hadn't of admitted that you missed the whole point of the Bible after purportedly reading it from cover to cover then I may have taken heed to that statement.
I didn't admit any such thing. I simply stated that I didn't agree with what you think is the whole point of it. I used to, but I studied more deeply and changed my mind.
Oh, and on your first point: any 'true' Christian is defined by the Christian Bible. If they don't put their faith in that to be true and correct (infallible) then they are on shaky ground.
It's only a small minority of those who call themselves Christians who have so much arrogance as to believe they cannot be mistaken about the nature of the Bible.
According to the Bible, the most important thing is to believe a) you're a sinner and b) only Christ can save you from your sin
I've read it cover to cover and didn't get that from it.
its what suites God that matters.
Big jump from what you think God wants to what God wants.
I would really suggest you look at The Westminster Confession of Faith.
I've read that cover to cover, too. I think it contains some good stuff and some utter nonsense.
I don't think you'd find a better book to run you through the basics.
I think you should perhaps assume that I've got the basics covered.
Yes but they are interpretations of ancient documents, not interpretations of mathematical equations and physical experiments.
They're interpretations of current experience as much as they're interpretations of ancient documents. When the religious person experiences something they check whether it fits with their current theories, and only modify their current theories if it doesn't fit. Much as scientific people do (after all, they're often the same people). Note that I'm not trying to argue that science and religion are the same thing -- they're not. It's just that this isn't where the difference lies.
I couldn't find a real reason why anybody (other than Stallman) would care.
Contrariness?
Heck, the "coalition of the willing" invaded Iraq to get to somebody believed to be hiding near the Afghan/Pakistani border -- invading Australia instead of New Zealand seems to be as good as our precision strikes get nowadays.
That used to work the other way around, too. When the police kept moving anti-apartheid protestors away from the South African embassy in London, the Church of Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields, right opposite the embassy, invited the protestors onto the church steps, where the police couldn't touch them because the protest was perfectly legal on private land with the consent of the landowner. Of course, now the protestors could just be served with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders on the grounds that they are annoying the neighbours :-(
A true Christian believes there is another sense, the soul - that is actually the core of a human. Unfortunately for materialists, this is illogical because they can't measure or define it using their material senses - meaning endless looping arguments.
Who defines what a "true Christian believes"? I ask, because I don't recall the doctrine that the soul is a sense occurring anywhere in the Bible or the classic creeds of Christianity. So although I'd have no problems with "some Christians believe" but I wonder by what authority you claim them to be the only true Christians.
I would wager that many of you here believe that extraterrestrial aliens could exist (an existence that cannot be materially defined), but completely deny the possibility of a God who created this whole universe. I'd also wager that many of you here would believe that an extraterrestrial could exist in a form of being that we have not come across before - yet STILL won't believe in the possibility of a God that created this whole universe. I find it quite frustrating.
Perhaps you're missing the role of Ockham's razor in science. Ockham's razor doesn't tell us anything about what's actually true, but it helps us to decide in what order to consider theories -- scientists deal with the simplest first. Since the Christian God is traditionally claimed to have a few infinite attributes, science will only consider that possibility once they've dealt with all finite possibilities (which means in practice that they'll never get to the infinite case). Science will deal with the possibility of a being that is merely very powerful and very knowledgeable (your alien) before it deals with the case of a being that is infinitely powerful and infinitely knowledgeable (the traditional Christian God). Even if we have the extra sense you describe then the same will apply to how science would interpret the perceptions of that sense.
It's important, though, that none of this excludes belief in God, or makes it unreasonable, it just makes it unscientific. Science isn't omniscient either. There is a place in life for stuff that isn't scientific; after all, when scientists believe their spouses to be faithful it's rarely on the grounds of randomized double-blind trials of a sample of spouses.
Well, as I am a solipsist I have proved it to my own satisfaction sufficiently for all practical purposes that one exists. But note that solipsism has been rather misrepresented hereabouts. I am an epistemological solipsist, that is, I believe it is impossible to know beyond any doubt that the external world exists, but that doesn't mean that I think it doesn't. I happen to think it does, but that's a matter of belief, not knowledge, and cannot be rationally justified.
As for your argument that religions "mainly seem to have been attempts at rational explanation of observations", I disagree with the "mainly", but even insofar as you're correct, the fact that those attempts *weren't* truly rational is what makes them religious. That's what was so explosive about the scientific revolution - humankind finally figured out a way to rationally find answers without error (which isn't to say that scientists don't make errors).
I think you overestimate the rationality of science. I'm not saying that science isn't rational, but that it cannot be entirely founded on rationality. The positivists tried to do that, and Karl Popper blew them out of the water. He gave us falsifiability in place of the "scandal" of induction, but had to concede that the boundary between the scientific and the metaphysical can only ever be a convention -- try reading his "The Logic of Scientific Discovery"; it's quite accessible.
Speaking of errors, scientists get stuck in their conception of how things are and begin to fail to consider that which is contrary, just like everyone else. But science isn't any more a religion than political ideology is. To include those in the word "religion" is to strip the word of all unique meaning.
If that refers to my comment elsewhere in this thread about those whose religion includes science, I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote. I didn't say that science was a religion, rather that some take a definition of religion that doesn't assume irrationality and that is wide enough in scope to cover all that they are engaged in, including science. I think John Polkinghorne takes that approach.